The Only Winning Move

Arnold Kling has a followup post to his earlier speculation that Ayn Rand’s enduring appeal owes to her being a kind of “ellaborate justification for low agreeableness,” about which I posted some thoughts. In it, he offers advice based on his own experience on how to get by as what I term an “anagreeable.” His sugggestions are useful, as are two of the ones currently posted in the comments. I’ll let you click through for Kling’s advice - it’s the two in the comments that interest me here.

The first is from someone awesomely named Joshua.

Once a decision is made, even if it’s not the one you would prefer, let it go and do your best to implement it (if that’s your job) or ignore it (if it’s not part of your job). One thing that people who are low on Agreeableness seem to have trouble with is dredging up old arguments and disagreements over and over again.

And how. I’m extremely bad about this. I find it very hard to go along with decisions I disagree with - and that cuts right to Kling’s point about Rand, actually. I’m certain that one of the reasons I like her books is that she offers me an escapist world where people are maximally allowed to make their own decisions. Everyone hates groupwork, right? But I’m the kid who makes it work. Which is to say, I’m the kid who would rather just do the whole damn project himself and let other people claim part of the credit than have to sit and discuss things in committee. Joshua’s hit on the main source of problems for anagreeables, I think, and this is very good advice. The first thing any of us should learn is how to move on once decisions are final. With regard to Kling’s point - this gets right to the heart of it. I guess it’s a chicken and egg problem to say whether anagreeables cause Libertarianism or the other way round, but the high instance of anagreeables among Libertarian ranks certainly accounts for our bullheadedness about matters of principle. Libertarians are worse than people of most other political backgrounds at compromising and working with what we have. It’s sad but true: in talking to a Libertarian about policy, you are more likely to get a lecture about where things went wrong historically than what we can do about them tomorrow. There’s definitely a lot of focus on going back to a point in time before some choice bad decision was made and undoing that decision.

The second is from someone who calls himself Horation (no one is ACTUALLY named Horatio, of course!). And his is twofold: learning to accept criticism and learning to praise others.

The first part is interesting to me because I’ve noticed in my own life that I can be quite good at accepting criticism - a champion actually - IFF I’ve been working at it. It really is like exercise. Do a little bit of exposing myself to criticism, and I rapidly get very very good at taking it unemotionally. But if I take a month or two off, it’s like I forget how to control my reactions, and even minor slights make me angry. And I think people around me know this - because I get this weird mixture of willingness to criticise but walking on eggshells when they do it - as if they’re never sure whether they’re dealing with Dr. Jekyll, who will be receptive and actually try to take their advice to heart, or Mr. Hyde, who’s just going to sulk for hours afterward. I can think of a couple of times in my life when I was particularly good at taking criticism. One was learning Swedish, and the other was learning Tai Chi. In both cases I had teachers with complex feelings about whether they wanted me to be learning the subject at all - in both cases because I was a foreigner. And so in both cases I took some pretty brutal criticism until something snapped, and I just decided that I didn’t want positive feedback from these people at all, and I was going to listen to what they said and practice in my spare time until I got it right, even according to the frankly ridiculous standards that were being set for me. I even got to enjoy it in a perverse way, in a “that which does not kill me…” way, as an opportunity to assert control over my emotions and make something positive out of a negative situation. And it worked! Not just at those tasks, but in general. But the effect eventually wore off in both cases too. Moral being - it really is something you have to work at constantly, or you lose it.

The second part is related to the first, I think. I’m very bad at giving praise. Just can’t quite bring myself to do it in most cases, even when I understand that it’s socially expected. And I think that’s because of the strategy that I adopt to dealing with my inability to take criticism. I guess the truth is that there are few, if any, people who enjoy taking criticism, and there are in general two strategies for dealing with this. You can either try to affect your environment, or try to remake yourself. People who heap excessive praise are generally following the first strategy. They’re hoping to make people like them, and hoping that their own readiness to praise will be reflected back at them, providing ballast for what bits of criticism they do have to take. They’re trying to set up a situation where praise is the norm - sugar to coat the eventual pill. These people are a problem for those of us who take the second strategy, because they use praise like a social currency. Our unwillingness to reciprocate gets magnified in their eyes, because they’ve gotten so good at giving praise that they’ve forgotten that it takes effort for the rest of us, especially when we’re asked to give praise that is less than perfectly sincere. For those of us taking the second strategy, since it’s very self-directed - something that we have to work at - I think we get worried about a free rider problem in praise. We’ve made an effort to actively shape our own perceptions of what people say to us, why can’t they? It’s a classic conflict, of course, and it’s pretty easy to imagine that people who adopt the second strategy are overrepresented amongst conservatives and libertarians, and people who adopt the first amongst socialists and liberals. We face the same problem - how to deal with criticism - and it really is the difference between “we all help each other (socialist)” (=”praising others is a moral imperative”) and “we all help ourselves (capitalist)” (=”learning to take a beating is a moral imperative”).

Anyway, fascinating discussion - as are all discussions that I can related to my own character, I admit it! - and I hope to hear some other useful bits of advice from other commenters as the day goes on.

For anyone worried that the annoying Avatar might actually be the highest-grossing film of all time, as is sometimes claimed, fear not - it’s not even in the top twenty. A least, not according to NC State Economics students’ homework research. As their professor neatly sums it up, the winners are “Disney and the 70s.”

A popular meme these days is that we’re about to make the same mistake FDR did during Great Depression 1.0 - that of pulling back government stimulus too soon. The argument goes that the Great Depression was ending by 1937 until FDR pulled the rug out of the recovery by trying to reign in deficit spending. That being the case, we should sneeze at our multi-trillion dollar deficit and spill even more red ink to finance public works projects aimed at getting the recovery going. Bruce Bartlett is currently getting some press for this prescription.

Well, it might be right. But I see a couple of problems with the story even if you buy the Keynesian analysis that government pump-priming can be something other than distortionary - particularly with Bartlett’s version.

First, the idea that FDR was a deficit hawk is misleading. It seems to be true that he was worried about deficit spending - at least in the sense that he worried his voters were worried about it - but one can be a deficit hawk and still a fan of massive government spending and economic micromanagement, and FDR was pretty clearly a fan of both spending and micromanagement. The attempts to paint FDR as some kind of cautious conservative when it comes to pump-priming just aren’t going to work, even if you’re in a position to believe that he was serious about tackling the deficit in 1937. Our objections to Obama aping FDR aren’t objections to deficit spending per se, in other words, they’re broader objections to the whole idea of government massively interfering with markets. FDR’s temporary fit of concern about deficits isn’t going to answer the broader objections.

Now, I follow the logic that debt is a good thing if it gives you capital to grow: you borrow when you’re poor to get the resources you need to get rich, and then pay back when you’re rich. Fine. But this obviously only works if you spend your loan wisely. Squander it and you’re twice as poor as you were before. So another burden of proof that these new fans of stimulus spending need to meet is that of showing that the current stimulus spending is actually doing any good. In FDR’s case, as Bartlett points out, the problem was that once he cut public works programs to try to balance the budget, unemployment shot back up into the double digits. I am willing to buy that as evidence that a lot of the employment at the end of the Depression was maintained by the government. But what evidence is there for that in the current stimulus? My understanding is that a lot of the stimulus money hasn’t been spent, and that what has been spent has been spent mostly to shore up already-existing government jobs. There hasn’t been any massive public works investment like there was in the 30s - and so it’s hard to see how cutbacks in federal spending are going to throw anyone out of work. The percentage of employment that is accounted for by direct government payouts now is not so different from the percentage accounted for by direct government payouts before - in CONTRAST to the situation FDR faced in 1937. The stimulus of the noughts, to the extent that we had one, was in keeping the financial system from collapsing, not in paying people to dig pointless ditches.

OK, so maybe people like Bartlett are arguing for public works projects as a way to cut some of the existing unemployment. But if that’s the case, then isn’t the FDR experience more like a counterargument? What FDR’s budget cuts show, if anything, is that government-provided jobs have a way of NOT turning into self-sustaining economic activity. Cut the budget even a little, and people have nowhere else to go. That’s NO ONE’s idea of a road to sustainable recovery! To the extent that government spending works to stimulate the economy, then only by getting cash flowing again so that the inarguably more efficient private sector can start investing. 1937 shows us that far from stimulating the private sector to do that, government provision of jobs just causes stagnation. If in 1933 the government “creates” a bunch of jobs that by 1937 have still not led to a situation where jobs can create themselves, then it’s fair to conclude that the jobs created in 1933 were just proxies for handouts - a covert dole. Unless Bartlett is arguing that we want a bunch of people stuck on the government payroll approximately forever, I’m not really seeing the point of holding FDR up as an example to follow.

I think the most galling thing about these arguments is that somehow the government always gets as much time as it needs to claim credit for jobs recovery, but if the private sector can’t deliver by tomorrow capitalism is pronounced dead on arrival. The financial crisis became apparent about a year and a half ago. If employment hasn’t recovered yet, well I’m not any happier about it than anyone else, but a year and a half is hardly the 4 years* that we’re giving FDR to build his track record now, is it? So how about this - pull back the stimulus and if in 2013 unemployment is still 10% or more, we can talk about massive public works investment. But since signs show that unemployment is abating even without this investment, what would the argument POSSIBLY be for starting it?

*Actually it’s a lot more than that, since full recovery from the Depression didn’t come until 1951-2. So apparently the government gets a 20-year handicap from its fans.

The CommGAP Blog has a fascinating story about worthless currency in India. No, not the usual kind. This kind is literaly worthless - as in, it’s a zero rupee note. The idea is to fight the rampant bribe culture in India. Read the original for more detail, but the broad outlines are that an Indian physics professor suggested the idea to 5th Pilar, an anti-corruption NGO. Citizens request the notes and then hand them to officials in place of bribes.

Shockingly, it’s actually been effective. You wouldn’t think so, right? Bribery is, unsurprisingly, a criminal offense in India, but then isn’t it everywhere? And yet, 5th Pilar reports a lot of success stories. What gives? Well, there are a lot of theories, but the one that I buy is this one:

This last point—people knowing that they are not alone in the fight—seems to be the biggest hurdle when it comes to transforming norms vis-à-vis corruption. For people to speak up against corruption that has become institutionalized within society, they must know that there are others who are just as fed up and frustrated with the system.

This is of course related to earlier discussion of Senator-elect Brown. A lot turns on knowing that people are organized. It’s one thing to experience corruption, realize how unpleasant it is, and make the obvious assumption that everyone else finds it unpleasant too. If you’re not convinced that they’re going to do anything about it, then you lose, plain and simple. Whatever erstwhile free service it is that the official in question has decided to start charging people for, you’re not gonna get it while others willing to pay the bribes will. It’s quite another thing, however, when you know that a lot of people are going to stand up as well - and you know that if an organization is issuing official “anti-corruption” currency that you can pay to an official in place of a bribe. It makes it look like an organized thing that a lot of people are participating in. It doesn’t have to be everyone - it just has to be enough people in your locale that the official in question has a real fear of being reported. And really, this only needs to be a handful.

In second place - I’ll bite - probably comes personal shame. I guess government officials who are enthusiastic about bribe-taking are actually in the minority - and that’s just because I genuinely believe that most humans are basically decent. Bribery spreads like anything else - padding your resume, for example. I guess most of us would prefer to just do good work and list our relevant accomplishments, but faced with the prospect of losing a job to someone less qualified than us just because he is willing to outright lie and we’re not, we shrug, tell ourselves it can’t be helped, and find ways to list technically irrelevant things like everyone else. I guess most government officials would prefer to live in a world where there are no bribes, but if everyone else around them is taking bribes, and not taking bribes will obviously be seen as a threat by those people, then promotions and even continued employment have a way of being on the line, or at least so he imagines. And like everything else, the first time is hard, but a couple more times after that and it comes to seem normal. Eventually, when your life plans come to include your bribery income, you start to see it as an entitlement.

Well, I wish the zero rupee campaign the best of luck. I imagine they will hit a wall at the corporate level, but you never know.

I’ve been a Vim user for a long time, and the trouble with being a long-term Vim user is that it’s frequently not too different from being a short-term Vim user. It’s an incredibly powerful text editor with an incredibly steep learning curve, and the trouble is that a lot of us, once we know enough to feel the massive Vim advantage, just never really get around to doing all the truly advanced things.

Like, for example, search-and-replace across multiple files.

Honestly, Vim has added at least 14 hours to my life over the years with all the time it’s saved me on search-and-replace. But even though I knew it could do this across multiple files - have known for almost a year now, actually - I never bothered to go and learn it.

Fortunately, Ibrahim Ahmed’s got the goods. Apparently the trick is that you pass all your related filenames to args:

:args *shtml

Annd then you process them all through argdo, careful to pipe it to update so that all the files get saved. (Yes, undo seems to work across files for this command as well!)

:argdo %s/one/two/g | update

This was a huge help today adding a link to the header logo of every page in a conference page I’m making for the Lingusitics Department. Yes, yes, I know I’m supposed to have done this with server side includes, or Javascript, or to have done the whole project in Rails to begin with. Honestly, it’s not such a large-scale venture that I feel the need to get it absolutely perfect.

The Department Website itself, on the other hand, could look a lot more professional. One of my (serious) goals for this semester - since I think it will probably be the last semester I am webmaster for IU’s Linguistics Department (moving on to graduate soon).

Anyway, thanks, Ibrahim!

Here’s Megan McArdle saying pretty much what I did about the Brown win’s likely effect on healthcare legislation:

As I read it, majorities of both houses do not want to pass this bill–otherwise, they wouldn’t have run for the exits so quick. They were looking for an excuse that they could deploy without risking retaliation from the leadership–and what the Massachusetts election showed, is that they don’t have all that much to fear from the leadership, because the leadership may not be there after November. Reid’s almost certain to lose his seat, and Pelosi may lose her majority in the house.

Seemingly small changes in power distribution make a big difference when they’re not targeted right. And power blocks in republics are NOT always a reflection of the will of the majority.

On a related note - a common theme in the blogosphere - both left and right - is chewing over whether President Obama overreached by making healthcare a priority. The leftists say no - Republicans would never have let it pass; the right say yes - the average American voter is satisfied with his healthcare plan and doesn’t want government intervention on this scale. My own thought is that it’s neither: Obama could’ve passed some kind of national healthcare plan resembling the one he wanted if he’d been more cautious and open about it. Start by recognizing that a national healthcare plan is a big step and that it will make the public nervous. Then give yourself a year to do real research into policies that have been adopted abroad and how they would likely translate to an American context. Then allow Congress to chew on it slowly. While this process is going on, make comments about it that are informed, rather than alarmist. That is, rather than just endlessly repeating the numbers we’ve all heard before about how many people your plan would insure, engage the opposition by admitting that they have a point about side-effects (because honestly, can anyone name even a single welfare state plan that didn’t sport some unintended side-effects?) and try to address their concerns. Also, just admit that there are going to be costs. Because there are going to be. If you can’t be honest about what everyone (reasonable) already knows, can you really be surprised when people don’t trust you? Above all, DON’T try to pass sea change legislation in your first year in office. Set a more reasonable timeline. I think if Obama had taken this approach, national healthcare would’ve been a slam dunk, and he would’ve even gotten points from historians for his thoughtfulness.

Oh well.

Well, well. The Colts won the AFC championship, which means the Super Bowl is gonna be a pretty big deal around here. And they’re playing the Saints, who are headed to the big game for the first time ever, after winning an NFC championship that went into overtime for only the third time ever (the AFC has only done it once - which makes three plus one equals four total playoff games that have gone into overtime), and also, incidentally, marked the first time since 1993 that the top seeds in both conferences made the final. OH, and it’s the first time in all of human history that a team has entered the Super Bowl with a leadup losing streak of three or more games. And several other hugely fascinating things that I would have no clue about if not for the internet, because I don’t give a papal shit about NFL, and my only dog in this race is that the Hoosiers around here are going to be more Hoosier than normal for the next two weeks (note: I use “Hoosier” as a synonym for “annoying in a Hoosier kind of way.” And that definition is “recursive” rather than “circular” thank you very much.).

No, my interest in this - and I would really like to know - is whether sports trivia has become more obscure since the advent of near-universal internet access? I wonder if there is a way to test. It has to have, right? Because if even I can know things like that the Vikings were the league’s first 0-4 Super Bowl team way back in 1977, what do you have to do to signal you’re a real NFL fan? Someday someone should write a science fiction book about a geek who develops a supermemory technique and uses it in a conspiracy with a bunch of other geeks to memorize everything there is to know about football, so that football knowledge is completely redunant as a signaling mechanism, and speculate on what happens. Really, I bequeath this sparkling gem of an idea to the world, because I’m generous and care deeply about All Humanity.

I think Arnold Kling has hit the nail on the head with regard to Ayn Rand’s enduring appeal. What he says isn’t the whole story (call me old-fashioned, but I still think making convincing arguments has something to do with it), but it’s hard to argue that it isn’t an important part of it.

The thesis is that Rand appeals to “low agreeableness” people - that is, people who rate “agreeableness” comparatively low as a virtue and therefore resent all the evidence that they see around them that being agreeable pays dividends (in terms of career advancement by having the right connections, etc.). Kling suspects - and I suspect he’s right - that Libertarians are disproportionately represented in this crowd. We are people who, for whatever reason, don’t make the right friends, are unwilling to brownnose to get where we want to go, and generally just like to be left alone to do our own things. For obvious reasons, if you’re such a person, then meritocracy takes on a greater importance for you than for most. Ayn Rand is nothing if not a pro-meritocracy extremist, and she underscores the point by making her heroes hard to get along with. Suffering fools gladly is not something that her characters do well, and given the adversity they tend to face and the way they react to it, they cannot be accused by even the most disingenuous reviewer of having exploited social connections to get there they got. Rand is comforting for us “disagreeables” because she reassures us that if you just keep putting your best foot forward and giving the finger to people who deserve it, you’ll eventually achieve all your goals. Keep on keepin’ on - that’s something we CAN do. Playing golf to get a promotion? That not so much.

This will be taken by many as a denigration of Rand, an attempt to paint her as a panderer - but I don’t think it should be. It is as good as inarguable that the world would be a better place were it a total meritocracy, and it IS inarguable that there is a brazen hypocrisy to advancement by agreeableness. To see that this latter point is so, ask yourself when the last time was you heard someone admit to a crowded room that “I promoted Bill because he makes such great cocktails,” or “Shelly got the job because she flirts with me and makes me feel attractive,” or “I voted to give Jane tenure because she finds ways to cite my papers.” As recently as never, right? Right. And in fact, I think we can go a step further. I think the main reason why so many people put up with so much bullshit without complaining, even when there is no obvious immediate reward for doing so, is because they fear that maintaining a general tolerance for hypocrisy will benefit them in the long run. It’s sort of like supporting the welfare state because of the outside chance that you’ll fall on hard times and need social assistance: if the world were completely honest, a lot of people who are afraid of the verdict would actually be judged on the quality of their work. Can’t have that…

If Rand can be accused of anything, then of making a virtue out of being DISagreeable. Here there is cause for some blame. A lot of people have taken the stark lines with which she draws her characters as a license to be an asshole, and that is indeed unfortunate. But this cricism only goes so far in the end, as it’s based on mistaking style for substance - on par with blaming Star Wars for all those kids who actually practice summoning the Force.

In fact, I think far from shielding - what do you call people like me, anyway? How about “anagreeable?” You know, the a from amoral - not disagreeable per se, just indifferent to whether we are agreeable or not. OK, I think far from shielding anagreeable people from reality, she prepares us for it. Think of The Fountainhead. Howard Roark wasn’t an instant success, after all. He toiled in obscurity and poverty for most of his adult life, was a virgin until his late 30s, and when he finally did come to the public’s attention and garner some measure of financial success, he was immediately the target of a pretty nasty smear campaign. Melodramatic I’ll buy, but it can hardly be accused of sugarcoating the price for refusing to join the country club!

No, I think Kling’s right on. What’s more, I think Rand would’ve agreed.

Dear movetoamend.org:

I was just reading your page - presumably in protest of yesterday’s Supreme Court Ruling to the effect that corporations have speech rights - arguing that “money is not speech, and that human beings, not corporations, are persons entitled to constitutional rights,” and I’m stuck on the section at the bottom right of your page asking for “organizational endorsements.” Your list of organizations from whom you would like endorsements includes businesses and unions - the first of which are potentially and the second of which are definitely corporations under the law. So, corporations DO have speech rights, then? Or is it only when they’re arguing that they don’t?

Love,

Confused in Indiana

On the off chance you haven’t heard, Brown won the seat vacated by Ted Kennedy in Massachusetts yesterday, thus popping the Dems’ supermajority. Now they will have no effective defense against the fillibuster, which Republicans are expected to use to sabotage Obama’s healthcare plans.

Predictably, then, here’s Matt Yglesias trying to downplay it and completely missing the point in the process.

Yglesias’ argument is that since there are already Democrats like Evan Bayh who are dragging their feet on the president’s healthcare agenda, Brown’s win does’t actually matter that much. You see, these people were already going to sabotage the agenda, were already going to make the Dems come up a vote or two short, and so adding one more Republican to the mix doesn’t really change that much. In his own words:

Scott Brown joining the Senate will make it impossible to make big progress on the big issues facing the country. But a number of “centrist” Democrats have been making it clear for a while now that they don’t want to make big progress on the big issues facing the country. That’s too bad, and Brown winning will only make things worse. We’re much more likely looking at a situation where Brown’s victory becomes an excuse for people not to do things they didn’t want to do anyway than a situation where Brown’s victory is the actual reason those things can’t be done. [Emphasis mine]

Ahem. So Brown winning is no big deal, but it provides an excuse for people not to do things they didn’t want to do anyway? Wha…? Unless I’m very much mistaken, that’s actually an argument for Brown’s win being a big deal - as in possibly decisive on the healthcare issue.

Let me tell you a story about Romania. It was once ruled by a very bad king. Actually, he started out as a passably good king, and was at least useful in undermining the power of the empire of which his country was a principality, but as the years rolled by he grabbed more and more power for himself and eventually made his people very poor, even though they were well-educated and produced many useful things. Now it turns out that 20th century kings - rather like 9th century kings - have to be reconfirmed in office every couple of years (yes, even Bernanke) by winning the approval of their immediate underlings, the noblemen, and this king was no different. However bad he became, however, his noblemen just kept on approving - and in fact when he was finally deposed, it was because of a violent revolution among the peasants - inspired by foreign events, no less! - rather than a straightfoward denounciation by his peers. But this seems wrong: why would the noblemen allow it to come to a peasant revolt? Peasant revolts are never good for the nobility…

As it turns out, many - maybe even most - of the noblemen wanted to depose the king, and there were frequent secret agreements to do just that. But here is the trouble. The confirmation ceremony to either retain or boot the king involves each nobleman individually standing up and saying whether he approves or not. That puts the first man to disapprove in a very awkward position. He has no way of guaranteeing that his comrades will back him up - and if they don’t, the price is very high. He will, at the very least, lose his status. He may even lose his life, for he will be called a traitor - disloyal to the man on whose authority he is a noble! But what he stands to gain is uncertain. If a new king is elected, he may also lose some of his status, though he will not lose his life. Of course, it is more likely that he will gain in status with the new king, but by how much it is impossible to say. It is little surprise, therefore, that however many plots to vote against the king were hatched, it very rarely happened that the conspirators went public, and the few times they did, their comrades, predictably perhaps, refused to back them (here’s a video of the most famous such incident). Risks run high when you don’t know how many people you have on your team.

Of course, it’s a completely different game when your king isn’t a king. If your king isn’t a king, then you don’t depose him simply by speaking out against him. Because how can you depose someone who isn’t on a throne?

That, it seems to me, is the game-changing trump that is Senator-elect Brown. Currently, the Democratic Leadership in Congress is on a throne. It has an absolute majority plus a team-member as president, and can therefore pass whatever legislation it wants. In reality, we know that this means it can only pass the legislation that is especially important to it - but that is another way of saying that there is a political price to be paid for opposing the legislation the leadership wants passed from within the party. Brown, however, means that the Democratic Leadership is no longer a king. It continues to have great power, but that power is no longer absolute. It has been deprived of the luxury of picking a handful of legislative packages for which it can guarantee passage. Now that the throne is no longer in the room, there is nothing to depose.

In particular, now that there is no longer a throne in the room, it is not so clear that the electoral success of individual Democrats is tied to the Democratic Leadership. It isn’t just that Brown’s election means that the peasants are not so keen on the king anymore, you understand. It’s that because the Democratic Leadership is now no longer a king, it has less ability to present a coherent legislative package which it can carry to the next election. The deposition of the king puts the “I” back in “team,” so to speak. When the king was around, it was clear where power lay and whom you had to petition to get more of it. Now that the king is gone, it’s not so clear, and everyone is kind of on his own to build strength through alliances. There isn’t so much of a danger of being denounced as a traitor anymore because what, exactly, would you be betraying?

I guess the reason that the Twelfth Party Congress ended up unanimously reelecting Ceașuescu, even after Pîrvulescu’s Big Denounciation, is just because of the uncertainty associated with booting him. When you know where power sits, then you at least know where power sits. It’s the devil you know - a devil, yes, but you know where it is. And if you’ve been trying to get power for yourself all this time, then you’ve been trying to get it from that very devil. There are investments at stake.

The US Congress is of course not the PCR Party Congress, and that is precisely the point. Because there is a seated opposition in the US Congress - unlike in the PCR Party Congress - there won’t be a Pîvulescu who stands up before his own party and is publicly booed as a traitor - even as a disconnected majority of the booers secretly agrees with him. There is no need for such a man: the adversarial system we cherish assigns the duty of opposing the government to the opposition. It’s their job! And when the rival party does the denouncing, no one in the ruling party considers it treasonous - that’s just what rival parties do. The point for individual members of the ruling party is that once the denouncing’s been done, it’s already public. You don’t undermine anything that hasn’t already been undermined by saying what you think about what’s already been said.

Yglesias is right that there were always nay-sayers within the Democratic ranks. But when in history has there been a power block without nay-sayers? Unanimity of opinion only happens in naive fantasies of politics. In the real world, there are ALWAYS private objections to legislative agenda. The question for the people driving the agenda is now and has always been more one of keeping those objections private through the end of the vote than making sure there are no objections in the first place. Brown’s election will have seriously undermined their ability to do that - and THAT is the point. It’s everything, actually, and if Yglesias can’t see that, then only because he doesn’t understand politics. But then, that’s been an open secret for some time.